Of No Interest to the Nation: A Jewish Family in France, 1925-1945
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Gilbert Michlin
After surviving Auschwitz, Gilbert Michlin emigrated from France in 1946 to live with his uncle in the United States. He is a mathematical engineer, retired from IBM.
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Of No Interest to the Nation - Gilbert Michlin
Of No Interest to the Nation
Of No Interest to the Nation
A Jewish Family in France, 1925–1945
A Memoir
GILBERT MICHLIN
With an Afterword by Zeev Sternhell
Wayne State University Press Detroit
Copyright © 2001 Editions Albin Michel, S.A., 2001. English edition © 2004 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.
Originally published as Aucun intérêt au point de vue national: la grande illusion d’une famille juive en France
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Michlin, Gilbert, 1926–
[Aucun intérêt au point de vue national. English]
Of no interest to the nation : a Jewish family in France, 1925–1945 : a memoir / Gilbert Michlin ; with an afterword by Zeev Sternhell. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8143-3227-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Michlin, Gilbert, 1926–. 2. Jews—France—Biography. 3. Concentration camp inmates—Biography. 4. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—France—Personal narratives. I. Title.
DS135.F9M5313 2004
940.53'18'092—dc22
2004009641
ISBN:13 978-0-8143-3848-3 (ebook)
To Riwka Dworetzkaia, my dear mother
To Moshe-Meyer Michlin, my dear father
To Mireille
To my brothers and sisters from Bobrek (Auschwitz III)
CONTENTS
The Spark
As Happy as God in France
The Gilded Country
Living, at Last
Of No Interest to the Nation
The Descent into Hell
Auschwitz-Birkenau
Bobrek
Gleiwitz
From Buchenwald to Schwerin
Paris
Epilogue
Sources for Research
Afterword: The War against the Enlightenment and against the Jews—Zeev Sternhell
The Spark
I am one of the too numerous who experienced the German death camps during World War II. I am lucky to be one of the too few to have returned.
This monstrosity—this experience,
as it is usually referred to—is something I have never forgotten. To this day, I yearn to know why and how people could have plunged me into hell simply because I was. I yearn to understand why and how my father, my mother, friends, entire families had to perish for the very same reason. I have asked these questions a hundred times, a thousand times, and never received an answer. Nor did I find the time to look for one as I resumed life after the war and tried to forget.
Upon my return from the camps, I went to the United States, where I studied and then worked. In time I was transferred by my employer, IBM, to Europe, where I spent nearly my entire career. I barely allowed myself a moment to search for answers to the questions that haunted me. Retirement provided me that opportunity, but, perhaps subconsciously terrified by the responses that would thrust me back into that world, I put off the research. I still had some old dreams I wanted to realize. My interest in political science, a hobby I have enjoyed for as long as I can remember, was satisfied when I signed up for some courses at Sciences Po, the Institut d’Études Politiques (France’s most prestigious school of political science). My life was moving along peacefully. Meanwhile, I kept putting off my ultimate quest.
Then, one ordinary morning, April 8, 1993, my world was shaken. The time had come. In that morning’s International Herald Tribune, I discovered an article about a certain Kurt Werner Schaechter that would lead me down a road I knew I had to follow. The title was Lifting the Veil on Vichy,
and beneath it was written: One Man Tries to Pry Open Archives on French Actions in the Occupation.
Schaechter, a French Jew with Austrian roots, was working diligently to make information available from the period of France’s occupation by the Germans. The French archives were not, and still are not, open to the general public. He told Alan Riding, a prominent journalist, about his difficulties. Upon his retirement, Schaechter had begun an investigation to find out what had happened to his parents during the war. He knew they had been deported after being held in Toulouse (in the south of France). Dealing with one bureaucracy after another, he was finally granted special dispensation to consult the archives of the camps in the French region of Haute-Garonne. He was fascinated by the stacks of papers he came across, and among them, he found his mother’s identity card. With the help of the young historian volunteering at the archive, he borrowed
documents in small batches, which he photocopied and returned. Schaechter walked away with more than twelve thousand copies. He felt uncomfortable having to smuggle out this information, but he justified his actions as vital to historical research, since the French authorities had blocked all access to these archives.
This fascinating story plunged me deep into my past. Images resurfaced of my mother, who died in Auschwitz after that terrible journey
we made together, and of my father, who disappeared very early on and was gassed, and of my own life in hell. This was accompanied by the unrelenting question: How and why did this happen to us? I had to meet Kurt Schaechter. I obtained his address, and a few days later I arrived at his home in the Paris suburb of Alfortville. I spent the entire day listening to his story, poring over the extraordinary documents he had copied. I recall one that was truly shocking, incomprehensible and tragic in its cruel banality: a bill from the SNCF (the French national railway) for the transportation of prisoners
—one-way fares with the amount in francs per traveler.
Even more extraordinary was the reminder sent, after the Liberation, by the SNCF’s accounting department to a préfecture requesting payment!
That entire day, I was absorbed in the memory of my parents and of what I myself had experienced. It was the spark that pushed me headlong into a desperate search for answers to the questions that were deep in my subconscious. I decided to take action and search the archives for some answers, in spite of the difficulties that Kurt Schaechter warned I might encounter.
As is often the case in these situations, one thing led to another. About a month after I discovered the Schaechter article, my wife called me in to hear a radio program on France-Culture: Sensitive Archives, produced by Sonia Combe. As I listened to the guest, Maurice Rajsfus, discuss his research on the Holocaust, I had a strange intuition. My father had disappeared in 1941 after he lost his job. Could he have been one of the Jewish workers transported to the Ardennes region (near the Belgian border) whom they were discussing? I found out how to contact Sonia Combe and, after explaining the reason for my call, asked if I could talk to her guest. She took my number and told me, in a voice full of emotion, that she would give it to him. A few minutes later, the phone rang and Maurice Rajsfus introduced himself. I told him about my intuition and he asked me to hold the line. When he returned, he said these few words that I shall not soon forget: Your father is in my book.
I had for the first time found some trace of him.
That day, the great adventure began. A few weeks later, I traveled with Rajsfus to the town of Bulson in the Ardennes, where my father had lived and worked. There, thanks to stubborn persistence and determination, I found a forgotten box in the attic of the teacher who doubled as the town’s mayor and librarian. In it was a list of all the Jews who had worked in that godforsaken, desolate bit of land. My father’s name was on the list. We asked the people in the town who were old enough to recall the German Occupation if they remembered the Jews.
I showed a photo of my father, and my heart pounded when I heard one of the men say he thought he recognized the man in the photo as the man who repaired my shoes.
Since that day I have devoted most of my time to reconstructing the past. The result is here for my parents, for myself, and for all those who, like us, believed wholeheartedly that it was possible to be as happy as God in France.
AS HAPPY AS GOD IN FRANCE
The Gilded Country
My parents, Moshe and Riwka (Riwke, as my father called her) Michlin, had known each other for several years before marrying in 1923 in Niezwiej, a Russo-Polish territory. Life in Niezwiej was difficult. Anti-Semitism made the atmosphere oppressive and they felt the constraints of their religion as well. The young people dreamed of other horizons. Moshe, my father, had studied at the yeshiva and was teaching Hebrew. He dreamed of America, where two of his brothers had settled. One of them, Michael, was ready to welcome Moshe and have him work at the Hebrew school he was running in Detroit. My mother, Riwka, a French teacher, dreamed of living in France where her brother and cousin were living. Her cousin, Mayer Yellin, was working in the garment industry and had set up a cap manufacturing business called Elina. France was, of course, the country of Human Rights. The first country to emancipate the Jewish people, it was a place where they could live well. Lebn vi Got in Frankraykh, As Happy as God in France, they would say.
In July 1920, my father took the initial steps to make the move to the United States. At this point, his family had been thrust into a precarious situation, a situation that the following year would become perilous. In a diary my uncle Michael kept in Hebrew, later deciphered for me by my cousin Leah, there is an entry on February 1, 1921. Michael had received letters from my father and my grandparents. A fire had destroyed their house: They had virtually nothing left to their name.
Their departure was imperative. My grandmother asked my uncle to help get two of his brothers started across the Atlantic. My father was going to leave as well. While they waited, Michael sent them some money and had an affidavit issued to my father confirming that he would provide for Moshe financially in the United States if necessary. This official document was essential in order to obtain a visa, but obtaining a visa was not a simple affair. "The shores of the gilded country are still very distant, my uncle wrote in his diary three months later. Indeed, so many people dreamed of heading to America that the American consulate in Warsaw had to establish a waiting list. My father would not be eligible until November. Furthermore, the whole enterprise was very uncertain because the visa assured only passage on the ship and not entry into the United States.
The immigration laws, wrote my uncle,
were in the hands of President Harding." At that time, a proposed law was being submitted to Congress to considerably reduce immigrant entrance into the United States by adopting a quota system.
At the end of October 1923, two-and-a-half years after requesting the visa, my father, thanks to the financial support of his brother Michael, was finally able to head to Antwerp, where he boarded the SS Belgenland on the Red Star Line. My mother was to join him when he was settled in America. His departure was timely. The perilous situation soon turned tragic. My uncle’s diary entry of October 1, 1923, mentions a letter from his brother-in-law that draws a pathetic picture of the situation:
Our situation is getting worse. We are literally reduced to starvation. We have been hungry for the past three years. This lack of food weakens us little by little, and now it seems our destiny is to live in the most frightful conditions. For three years we have suffered in silence and, not being ones to complain, mentioned nothing of this in our letters. Now we have reached the point where the will to fight has abandoned us. . . . You should know that your sister has only one dress she managed to save from the fire. In fact, she has two more, but they are not fit to wear as they were sewn together from sacks of Passover flour that were sent to us from America for the Russian refugees.
My father received the visa in time. He arrived in the United States on November 15, 1923. However, he was not permitted to remain. The story is absolutely incredible. I was able to piece it together after a long and detailed analysis and cross-checking thanks to the U.S National Archives and Records Administration and that extraordinary law, the Freedom of Information Act, which allows anybody interested, for personal or family reasons, to consult the National Archives. Such a law in France would certainly be welcome considering that sometimes we are forced, as was Schaechter’s case, to find alternative
means to satisfy the most fundamental right of researching one’s family history.
That is how I was able to find Michlen, Moses
[sic] registered on the ship’s manifesto as a married man, of Polish nationality, a resident of Nieswiej [sic], race: Hebrew,
speaking Russian, able to read and write, and declaring himself to be a teacher. It was definitely my father. He listed as his closest family member my mother, Riwka Michlen [sic], born Dworetzki, and his final destination: Detroit, Michigan.
He had only fifteen dollars in his pocket and was neither polygamous nor, in this America rocked by the Sacco and Vanzetti case, an anarchist.
After the first- and second-class passengers got off at Manhattan, the boat headed for Ellis Island, where the third-class immigrants traveling in steerage would be sorted.
I visited Ellis Island, today an historic monument. Try to imagine this little island south of Manhattan accessed by a tourist boat as it passes by the Statue of Liberty, the travelers’ first image of America and a promise of happiness that is almost within grasp. An uninviting, brick-colored building awaited the newcomer. My father and his fellow passengers